JUNE 29, 1969
Cops raid the Stonewall Inn
Lavender & red, part 63
By
Leslie Feinberg
Published May 25, 2006 11:25 PM
After midnight on June 28, 1969, the police
raided the Stonewall Inn in Greenwich Village. Undercover cops, male and female,
were already inside. At 1:20 a.m., Deputy Inspector Seymour Pine led an assault
group of four cops from the First Division “morals squad” in
three-piece suits and ties, two patrol cops and detective Charles Smythe. The
patrol cop with the radiotelephone remained outside the bar, as the rest of the
cops entered the club shouting: “Police! We’re taking the
place!”
Ironically, the cops would soon find themselves holed up in
the bar, barricaded against an enraged crowd.
While details of the
rebellion that broke out later that night outside the bar are familiar to many,
historian David Carter offers the following detailed accounts from bar patrons
about the struggle that began to build up inside the bar that night during the
raid in his book “Stonewall: The riots that sparked the gay
revolution” (St. Martin’s Press).
The Stonewall Inn attracted
a mixed crowd, described by bar-goer Philip Eagles: “There were some
lesbians, hustlers, married people, single people, some transvestites, but not
too many. It was the heart and soul of the Village because it had every kind of
person there.” The bar drew some people of color, as well as
whites.
That time of night, a peak Saturday night crowd of some 200 filled
the club. David Carter noted, “Almost immediately after entering the
Stonewall Inn, the police encountered resistance.”
The cops ordered
grouped people in different rooms, then lined them up, demanding to see their
identification papers, then letting some go.
Philip Eagles said he
witnessed some customers “giving the cops lip,” shouting,
“I’m not showing you my ID,” and, “We’re not
taking this.” Eagles said he and some others also balked at producing ID,
and finally did so only with “a lot of attitude.” Another customer
refused the police order to leave the club.
Those who had extra forms of
identifica tion without photographs reportedly shared them with those who did
not have ID.
Carter added, “Whatever grumbling there may have been
from the gay men, the police soon ran into more significant resistance from
other patrons in each of the two rooms.”
Transgender and transsexual
patrons who were considered “cross-dressed” were grouped near the
bathroom, where female cops threatened to do strip searches to determine their
birth sex.
According to Deputy Inspector Seymour Pine, “We had a
couple of the transvestites who gave us a lot of flak.” Pine said:
“We separated the few transvestites that we had, and they were very noisy
that night. Usually they would just sit there and not say a word, but now
they’re acting up: ‘Get your hands off me!’ ‘Don’t
touch me!’ They wouldn’t go in, so it was a question of pushing them
in, fighting them.”
Philip Eagles also described that some lesbians
in the front room confronted police, arguing, “We have a right to be
here” and, “What are you doing?”
Eagles recalled that
cops were “feeling some of them up inappropriately or frisking
them.” He said the lesbians “were being pushed around and
bullied” and this, combined with the cops body-searching the women, made
“everybody generally very uncomfortable.”
Patrol cars from the
Sixth Precinct pulled up and parked in front of the Stonewall Inn as backup for
the raid.
Inside the Stonewall, those held by police were angry and
restive.
Raymond “Ray” Castro, a 27-year-old Puerto Rican
bakery worker, recalled that the cops “kept us there for so long, it was
almost like a hostage situation.”
Next: Temperature
rises.
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